Here are five nice pianos -- two Steinways, two Kawais and a Yamaha, handsome instruments of rich black lacquer, polished resin keys, and glimmering innards of steel, brass and red felt. Each one costs upwards of $80,000, and each has its own array of strengths and failings, which can help redeem or ruin a performance, depending on what the pianist has managed to figure out about the instrument's character. The heft of the felt hammers might be too present in the keys, or so airy that it feels like you could drop a tissue on the keyboard and sound a note. The upper register might be full of nice glittering overtones that turn leaden when the low notes toll. The spectrum of tonal "colors" might be marbled with hues that a particular player might not like. There might be something awkward with the bench.
Entrants in the 2003 William Kapell International Piano Competition have 20 minutes -- four minutes per instrument -- to plink and bang on these five keyboards and to select one that will behave for them in concert. They are 41 young musicians between the ages of 18 and 33, and there's a fair amount on the line for them: a shot at earning $20,000, and other tangible and intangible rewards that come with winning one of the most important titles on the piano competition circuit. Competitions inspire in a pianist an acute fear of error, and if these young musicians are nervous today, it's because here, in the choice of an instrument, lies the first of the coming days' many opportunities to make a bad mistake.
Dan Moran performing during the William Kapell International Piano Competition. Early on, he said, "It's going to be really brutal."
(Photograph by Carol Guzy)
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The piano selections follow a predictable procedure: A competitor comes out, sits at a piano, commences to play something phenomenally beautiful with a lot of clean velocity in the upper register, maybe Scarlatti, Chopin or Schumann. And then, just as the audience (at this point, a dozen or so piano company reps and media people scattered throughout this 1,000-seat hall) starts feeling symptoms of rapture, the pianist breaks off midphrase and goes into a sudden spasm of Rachmaninoff or Beethoven or Prokofiev to check out what sort of low-end firepower the instrument has. And as the heavy weather starts tumbling through the hall, the pianist cocks an ear, winces and abandons the keyboard for another instrument, and the thunderheads evaporate. The impression is of magnificence being squandered, like watching someone spit out good champagne at a wine tasting.
Then Canadian pianist Dan Moran comes out and sits at one of the Steinways, the New York model. He arches his fingers over the keys, and plays the first slow chords of Liszt's "Sonetto 123 del Petrarca," which are tense and arresting. Even so, one doesn't want to listen too closely because he's just going to pinch it off in a moment and leave it in the lurch. But Moran doesn't hop from bench to bench, as he's expected to, pecking out snippets. He simply plays the Liszt -- loiters in it. He knows these are important minutes, that he shouldn't spend them all at a single piano, but it's as though he doesn't want to insult the composition by playing a mere fragment of it. On he goes, through the whole piece -- sort of like checking a microphone by reciting Shakespearean sonnets. When he finally finishes the Liszt, he gets up and spends a few desultory minutes at a couple of the other pianos. Then he goes back to the Steinway. Moran is still lost in his playing when a guy with a clipboard comes over and tells him politely to get off the stage.
The Kapell is taking place at the University of Maryland, in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, a large complex with a yawning lobby, half a dozen performance venues, and a labyrinth of hallways vectoring off toward classrooms and studios. The center houses 103 Steinway pianos -- "the largest purchase of Steinways in this quadrant of the galaxy," says one faculty member. Live feeds from the Dekelboum Concert Hall, a postmodern cathedralish space where the competition recitals will be taking place, are piped into televisions and speakers throughout the building, even into some of the bathrooms. Most of the center's doors are made of wood two inches thick, and its performance and practice chambers have been soundproofed so rigorously that when you first set foot in one, there's a vertiginous feeling of suddenly being alone with your inner ear.
The day before the competition kicks off, the competitors are gathered in the lobby, attending a reception sponsored by Kawai. This year's field represents a roughly even mix of European- and North American-born pianists, and a slightly deeper pool of Asian-born artists (17 of the 41), whose numbers here reflect a general proliferation of Asian classical musicians over the last decade or so. Classical music "came much later to Asian culture, so it's a lot fresher," says Chinese-born Ning An, 26, of Boston. Asian parents, he says, "see it as something honorable, something very high-society-like, and something very worthy." For An's parents, whose musical careers were derailed by the Cultural Revolution, the hope that their son would become an accomplished pianist was especially keen. "I basically carry the hope of what they wanted to achieve," An says.
Disparate backgrounds aside, everybody radiates the same polite anxiety about the upcoming performances. There is wine in ample quantity at the reception, but most of the competitors are drinking water. Inna Faliks, 24, a Ukrainian-born pianist who lives in Baltimore, says that even trace amounts of alcohol in her system make her fingers "feel like wool." Then she cracks her knuckles and it sounds like someone shuffling a stack of dominoes.
The preliminary rounds begin tomorrow and wrap up two days later, at midday Friday. The reception's unofficial function is to sweeten the prospect of tonight's main event -- a numbers drawing to assign performance slots in the prelims. The entrants suffer intricate syndromes of worry and superstition about things that might provoke a bad performance or an unfair evaluation by the jury, and tonight's drawing figures high in just about every player's panoply of dreads. Everybody's hoping for an anonymous middle spot; not too early in the day, when the jurors' critical faculties are supposedly sharp and unforgiving, or late in the program, when they might be too tone-addled to be impressed.
Dan Moran is chatting with another competitor as they're summoned for the drawing. "Well, I hope you get a high number," the guy says.
"Don't even talk about it," Moran says fretfully.
Moran's apprehensions are understandable. Some of his colleagues here are seasoned contestants who have already racked up long lists of competition accolades, but Moran sees himself as a more inward artist who isn't totally equipped with the psychological armaments one needs to handle the competitive strain. Moran, who is tall, with a square jaw and a pale complexion, speaks quietly and with a clipped, round-voweled Canadian accent. He has a way of cocking his head and keeping it perfectly still when he's saying something he feels deeply about, which is often.
He has participated with moderate success in four previous competitions, though his last competitive outing, in 2000, at the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition in England, nearly cured him of ever wanting to do another one. He'd been living in Toronto, where he was pursuing a postgraduate degree at the Glenn Gould Professional School and waiting for a performing career to coalesce. He'd studied at various institutions in the United States, and been praised by prestigious teachers, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect a career in solo performance. But not many concert offers came his way, and it began to dawn on Moran, somewhat painfully, that the opportunities he'd thought would be waiting for him were already stretched pretty thin. "It was like I'd been going through life with blinkers on, without ever asking myself the big question: 'What are you doing, playing the piano? Don't you know that there are no jobs?' I'd look at concert pianists' bios, and be thinking, wow, they won this competition, they've played with this orchestra and that orchestra, and you go to a concert and it's in a small hall at half-capacity, and they're not even playing a 35-concert season. If this is the level I'm aiming for, and there are no concerts for them, then where are the concerts going to be for me at the end of it all?"
When he packed his bags for Leeds, his personal life was taking a turn for the worse as well. His wife, also an ambitious young musician, had secured an appointment with an orchestra in Spain, and the months away from each other had more or less ruined things between them. He was eliminated in the first round at Leeds, which, coupled with the doubts he'd been having, sent Moran into a crisis of faith. He booked a ticket to Spain and called his wife to say he was coming over to try to patch things up. "Don't come," she said. The divorce went through.
In this still moment in his life, Moran began reflecting bitterly on the sacrifices he had, unthinkingly, been making for his art for years.
"When you spend your life glued to the piano, you don't really communicate," he says. "You don't interact with other people. You get awkward. You walk out of the practice room and try to have a conversation with someone, and you think, 'What's wrong with me? Do I really want to be a concert pianist if it means spending my whole life locked in a practice room?' " He stopped spending all day, every day, at the keyboard. He started playing dinner music at a hotel, hanging out with friends, and "partying my ass off." For a year, he didn't play any solo piano recitals, and he steered clear of competitions. But then his career started rebounding. He took an accompanist position at the Banff Centre, and after that accepted an invitation to pursue his doctor of musical arts degree at the University of Montreal. The fractures in his confidence were beginning to knit, and when the application deadline for the Kapell came up last February, he decided he'd give it a shot.
Moran has been to the Kapell once before, in 1998, and he advanced to the semifinal round, though that earlier success adds a generous pressure to at least live up to his previous effort. Also, because most competitions are restricted to pianists younger than 33 or so, this year's Kapell is probably the last chance for Moran, who is 32, to exorcise his upsetting loss at Leeds. "If I don't pass to the next round," he says, "I'm going to be really hurt for a long time."
The contestants assemble in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall, the adjacent venue to the Dekelboum. Everyone is nervously eyeing a metal lacework drum, which has a crank on the side to tumble the numbered cards. One by one, 41 competitors are called to the stage as their bios are read over the PA system. People who draw high numbers look relieved. People who draw low numbers look like they've bitten into an unripe persimmon. When someone finally hits No. 1, the hall resounds with schadenfreude applause.
Dan Moran is called. He reaches into the drum, and closes his eyes prayerfully. He draws seven and looks instantly unhappy. After the drawing, the 41 pianists walk out into the main hall to pose for a group picture. It's the last time they'll stand together, their ranks unthinned by the jury. Moran takes a spot in the back row. As the shutter snaps, he manages a downward-tilting, horizontal comma of a smile.
Moran's piano career began with group lessons in fourth grade, a comparatively humble entree to the discipline; many of Moran's colleagues here started with private lessons at age 5 or 6. Moran's family didn't have a piano, so he practiced his fingerings on a plank of cardboard with the keys marked out. Moran's father, a finish carpenter and cabinetmaker, who had been a boy soprano in his native Liverpool, was glad to see his son take an interest in music. When the family bought a piano, his father would sit with Moran and quiz him on the names of the notes in the sheet music, though he didn't know them himself.
Moran soon switched to private lessons, and his devotion to the instrument quickly outpaced his attention to academics. He tried his hand at sports as well, but preferred solitary recreations like skiing or running -- a predilection for his own company that suited his piano study.
After graduating from the University of Calgary, there seemed few viable professional options, so he did what most young pianists do: He went from institution to institution, accruing degrees -- from Southern Methodist University to the Cleveland Institute of Music to Toronto's Glenn Gould School, and then to the University of Montreal, where he's pursuing his fourth graduate diploma.
"I didn't really think of going into any other field," he says, "though there have been times in my life, over the past 10 or 12 years, when I wished I had."
Over the next 2 1/2 days, the jury will hear 21 hours of abbreviated recitals before announcing the first round of cuts on Friday afternoon. Although the 20-minute prelim rounds will number among the most important performances of these young pianists' careers thus far, the Dekelboum and lobby are devoid of brouhaha. Because these early rounds take place when most people are at work, and because they lack the savor of rising-stardom that draws crowds to the Kapell's later phases, most people play to a nearly empty house. The only ticketed audience members are a handful of people who buy a pass for all 10 days and attend everything. Though the prelims' endless sequence of recitals is enough to leave even the most devoted music lover feeling a little pianoed-out, the pass holders seem to be enjoying themselves.
"It's a marathon of beautiful music," says Maria Allwine of Baltimore. "It's not that I come here to hear someone beat someone else. Sometimes I don't even go to the finals. The person who wins, sometimes you're just shaking your head. All the players are really good, and often you think [the jurors] choose the ones least offensive to the different factions within the jury."
There are no competitors in the crowd. The artists themselves are nearly unanimous in their commitment to avoiding one another's performances. Those still waiting to play flit through the Clarice Smith Center like nervous ghosts or are out of sight entirely. After they perform, they seem visibly to uncoil. Byoungho Han, 32, who plays second, says after his performance that it feels "like I just got out of prison."
One of the less stricken competitors is Elizabeth Schumann, 21, who grew up in Blacksburg, Va. She has a pleasant, elfin manner and is immaculately polite. Nevertheless, she says, it takes a good deal of dark id-work to find the mental spaces where her best playing lies. "To play the Corigliano," she says, "I have to create a person who's almost on the edge of sanity in order to make the piece hold together. He sees one thing and he wants to go one way, and then he sees something else and wants to go another. We each have public personae, but this person has all those emotions we don't want to show anybody, and he actually shows them."
Her performance on the second evening of the prelims illustrates the point rather terrifyingly. She comes out looking waifish and overwhelmed. She smiles at the audience, takes her place on the bench and launches into Corigliano's Etude-Fantasy in Five Movements with a low-end haymaker that booms through the hall and takes everyone aback. The first movement is written for left hand only, and Schumann grips the bench with her right hand, levering herself against the keyboard. She has the rapt, nearly savage expression of a child stomping an anthill. In the second movement, she brings her right hand into play, and the piece grows sparse and lovely. People relax into their seats. The Liszt-Schubert transcriptions she plays next are deft, relentless and devastatingly good -- the sort of performance you experience not so much with your ears as your solar plexus. She breezes through a Chopin etude and exits to lively applause.
Dan Moran, who vanished into a practice room after the number drawing, performed at 2:30 on Wednesday (the day before Schumann). When he walked out on stage, he seemed stiff and ill at ease. When he sat at the keyboard, he was still top-heavy with tension. But then he opened the Liszt "Petrarch Sonnet" with measured delicacy. By degrees, the stiffness ebbed from his arms and shoulders. His pianissimo was pained and delicate, a cautious cat-and-mouse with silence that made the air feel breakable. Someone cleared his throat and it sounded like a pistol shot.
Afterward, Moran left the Smith Center to go somewhere for steak. The competition, he said, gave him an appetite for beef. He paused at the program placard near the door. "For me to advance I'd have to play better than every fourth person, and nobody here is bad," he said. "It's going to be really brutal."
2003 marks the 25th William Kapell International Piano Competition and Festival, and the 50th anniversary of the death of celebrity pianist Kapell, who died in a plane crash in 1953 at age 31. The proceedings, which run in mid-July, feature lectures, recitals and master classes by renowned pianists, panel discussions, and an ensemble of other piano-related doings, though the main attraction is the competition itself.
The competitors are, as of yet, largely obscure pianists, but they are all pedigreed and credentialed. This year 205 pianists applied to the Kapell, and 42 were invited to come to College Park (one dropped out). At the close of the prelims, the jurors will weed out 29 people, to a field of 12 artists who'll then get to present a broader cross-section of repertoire in recitals of one hour apiece. After the semis, the roster will be winnowed to three finalists, each of whom will perform a full, three-movement concerto in the Dekelboum with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The jury will award its first-prize winner $20,000 and a stylish blue trophy. The second-place award is $10,000. Third gets $5,000. All repertoire is played without a score, and most competitors show up with at least three hours of music perfectly memorized, the monstrous difficulty of which you can get a very faint sense of by cueing up a 30-minute concerto on your CD player and trying to hum along through the whole thing.
Piano competitions have been around as long as the piano itself, but the Kapell, founded in 1971, was part of a worldwide surge of international piano competitions that began in the 1950s and is still gathering momentum today -- a response, some say, to a drastic decline in classical music's listenership. In his book The Ivory Trade, an extended censure of Fort Worth's Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, music critic Joseph Horowitz portrays the metastasis of competitions as a "brash" and desperate effort to market classical music to the lumpen concertgoer, the sort of person who might not know what a concerto is but who could at least appreciate the idea of a bunch of pianists duking it out to see who's best.
The competitors, for their part, turn to competitions as a way to distinguish themselves in a professional climate marked by diminishing performance opportunities and a broadening glut of pianists in need of work. "Every year, thousands of [doctor of musical arts students] in piano performance are graduating -- just from American conservatories," says Christopher Patton, the Kapell's coordinator. "What are these people going to do? Very few are going to get solo careers. It's probably much more difficult than getting a spot on a major league sports team." International competitions like the Kapell offer pianists the opportunity to garner the sort of career buzz that might otherwise take years to accumulate, if ever. Still, they're exhausting for competitors. "I have to say that, if you asked people, they would say that they wish [competitions] weren't necessary," says one Kapell winner. "For me, I do it because I don't know what other way I can do it. I can't just show up at a conductor's house, and ring his doorbell and say, 'Hey, you've got to listen to me.' " While winning will not necessarily transform a previously unknown pianist into a household name, it can boost the artist into a marginally wider diameter of limelight. A winner can expect a busier concert schedule, at bigger venues, for better fees, which -- if he or she has the repertoire and temperament for it -- can mean the beginning of a significant career.
Besides the status and cash rewards, a victory provides young pianists with faith in themselves, a scarce psychological commodity in an art whose scant opportunities and taxing solitude make pianists susceptible to great, racking doubts. The issue of the psychological effects of competitions also provokes a fair amount of debate. Critics argue that while competitions like the Kapell may give career-sustaining emotional succor to the sole victor, they leave many more disillusioned artists in their wake, people like Dan Moran, who, after his first-round elimination at Leeds, wondered if he'd ever return to the keyboard. Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, quoted by Horowitz, said, "I suffer agony to see young artists go through the humiliation of a competition . . . The joy of those who succeed is spoiled by the sorrow of those who have been hurt." Horowitz goes on to quote Glenn Gould, who accused competitions of inflicting "spiritual lobotomy," and pianist and teacher Russell Sherman, who calls them "the anti-Christ."
The Kapell's organizers are well aware of these sorts of lathery criticisms. "We wanted to create a competition that will be a positive experience whether you advance or not," says Patton. The administration's ameliorative efforts show up in an array of details: the consolation receptions after each round of cuts, the recital of artists' bios at the number drawing, the footing of competitors' hotel bills even after they're winnowed out, the well-maintained spread of snack foods in the competition offices, and in the gale-force compassion of Christopher Patton himself, whose face expands with regard whenever a competitor stops him in the hall to complain about something. Patton acknowledges that it's not possible to fully anesthetize the ache of losing, but it's his hope that all the competitors take more away from the competition than stress, regret and ill will. "If you don't advance to the next round, and you're an artist, you're hurting," he says. "But we'd like everyone -- no matter how far they get -- to leave here with a better understanding of themselves as artists, and as human beings."
The list of semifinalists is posted at 4 p.m. in a hallway near the competition office. In the minutes before, competitors shuffle around in glum anticipation. Oxana Mikhailoff sits outside at a patio set. She casts an eye back inside. "This is torture," she says, and smiles.
Mikhailoff is a Russian-born 31-year-old with pale blond hair. She has a lean, mantislike elegance, and the chilly self-possession of someone who has spent lots of time away from home and is tired of dealing with strangers. Mikhailoff grew up in Moscow in a family of pianists. She began playing at age 5 and won her first competition at 8. "In those days I was practicing four hours a day, I thought," she says. "I was in an interview later with my mother. They asked how much I practiced when I was younger. I said four hours a day. My mother said, That's not true. You practiced six. She would set a little timer for me to practice, two hours in the morning, two hours at night. When I wasn't looking" she would turn the dial back.
Mikhailoff has won or placed in several competitions and played with a few prestigious ensembles, but, as with Moran, the Kapell is probably her last opportunity to win a title in a major competition and give her career the kick-start it needs.
When the sheet goes up, Mikhailoff rises, heads inside and shoulders her way through the crowd. She makes the cut. Her face is taut and luminous. She calls her husband on her cell phone. "I got it," she says. "Yes, yes. I got it."
Dan Moran appears at the edge of the crush of pianists. He'll be playing in the second semifinal slot. He takes note of it impassively, and heads off to practice.
The eliminees shrug and sigh and handle the disappointment with doleful aplomb. No one bursts into tears. There is some talk of whether to head over to a cocktail party Yamaha is throwing. "The losers' party," someone calls it. "There's no way I'm going to that."
But most people do go. They have shrimp cocktail and little beveled crab cake ingots. They drink margaritas and do not worry about their fingers feeling groggy in the morning.
March 1897 was the start of a rough stretch for Sergei Rachmaninoff. He'd been publishing compositions at a healthy pace, and, at 24, he was enjoying a reputation as one of Russia's best young composers. Then his First Symphony debuted. The conductor showed up drunk. The performance was a disaster, and to whatever extent the critics could discern the score itself, they loathed it. "If there were a Conservatoire in hell," one wrote of the composition, "Rachmaninoff would get first prize for his Symphony, so devilish are the discords he places before us." Rachmaninoff spent the duration of the concert crouched outside on the fire escape with his fingers jammed in his ears. "It was the most agonizing hour of my life," he said later.
He fell into a black despond, writing minor pieces on occasion, but incapable of producing another major composition. He found sporadic work as a conductor but devoted the balance of his time to taking long naps, hanging around with a boozy claque of fellow artists and despising himself. In 1899, Rachmaninoff was trying to haul his career from the ditch with a new concerto, but a crippling disbelief in his own talents was keeping him from completing it. In desperation, he visited a Moscow hypnotherapist, whose treatment consisted of sitting Rachmaninoff in a darkened room and drubbing him with monotonous encouragement: "You will begin to write your concerto . . . You will work with great facility . . . The concerto will be of excellent quality." The therapy was an unaccountable success, and Rachmaninoff finished his Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, which would become the most popular composition of his career.
Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto -- or "Rach Two," as people call it here -- is standard equipment on the competition trail. Dan Moran and two of the other semifinalists have stocked it for the final concerto round, though it has a particular significance for Moran, who sees parallels between Rachmaninoff's paralyzing anxieties after the debut of his first symphony, and his own lingering despair at the time of his loss at Leeds and his divorce. "He never wanted to compose again," Moran says, "but then he managed to go back to his work. That's why I sort of feel connected to the piece so much . . . This piece is very human, very connected to our emotions and our feelings, our fears, our disappointments and how we recover, how we come out of those disappointments fresh and new and with still a sort of sadness because we've gone through such a hard time."
Sitting in a practice room, he plays the first movement of the concerto, which opens with a musical description of what it's like to slip into an extremely bad mood: eight staggered chords whose fury swells from brooding displeasure in the first one to, in the eighth, a marauding intensity that crashes off the walls. The concerto has been part of Moran's repertoire for five years, and he has played it hundreds of times, but the concussive bleakness of the opening bars still haunts him.
As he moves into the second theme, the melody makes tentative little forays into the upper register, second-guesses itself, tumbles down, and regroups. "And now it's a little more confident, and now" -- the melody swells, grows more strident and insistent -- "it's gaining here, and now" -- the figure climbs again, this time with soaring vigor -- "it's totally transformed. It means so much! It's so passionate, so expressive, so -- "
He stops talking for a moment and instead simply plays.
Moran's absorbing intimacy with the Rach Two simultaneously illustrates the rewards and mammoth difficulties of playing the piano well. It requires not only a manual athleticism that takes thousands of hours to cultivate, it demands -- if you don't want to be one of those reviled pianists who "only play the notes" -- feats of empathy. You've got to try to make yourself comfortable in a piece's particular emotional terrain. You've got to allow yourself absolute vulnerability to what the composer has to say, to understand it so perfectly that you can repeat it in your own voice, all the while remaining absolutely in control so that you stay faithful to the score and don't miss any notes.
Playing the piano at this level is also an alienating and distressing endeavor, one that Moran feels distances him from the world, even as it brings him closer to other sorts of human understandings. "There's a lot of torment involved in knowing you don't fit in, but I've just been trying to come to terms with that and admit it." What pianists get for all their hard work is an odd kind of reward: a very deeply rooted love for something that doesn't always love them back. And if the young pianists at Kapell seem immoderately anxious about having their playing evaluated by the jury, it's because the relationship between the player and the music can be so vital and abiding, that subjecting it to jury evaluation feels revolting or inhumane, sort of like making love in front of clinicians for a grade.
Still, the pleasure of making music, for the artists who stick with it, mitigates the pressures of competitions and the other hardships that come with the job. "There's a reason why we do it -- we're not masochists," says Inna Faliks. "When you're playing, when you're completely in the music, it feels as though you're in touch with something eternal, profound, and this is what makes it all worthwhile. Something magical happens at the keyboard, a euphoria so strong drugs couldn't induce it. Of course, the difficulty then is dealing with everyday life."
The next morning, the competitors who didn't advance are feted with a brunch in a small theater across the lobby from the Dekelboum. The spread includes salmon, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, smoked chicken in little wallets of crepe batter, and big gerbera daisies floating in glass globes. At the end of the meal, the competitors are permitted a brief conversation with the jurors. Pairs of chairs have been set up around the periphery of the theater. "The confessional," says competitor Paul Wyse.
Up until now, the jurors' movements have been cloaked in a near-Masonic secrecy. The competitors have been forbidden to have contact with them. During the performances, the panel sits alone in the Dekelboum's otherwise empty balcony. There are seven jurors -- all with established reputations as performing artists or university-level pedagogues. Some, judging from their bios, also appear to have made mini-careers of pulling jury duty at various competitions around the globe. No one is allowed near them while the performances are going on, and some people here seem to attribute a kind of superhuman malevolence to the seven judges. At one point, a photographer asks if she can take a few photographs from the balcony. Absolutely out of the question, a staff member says. "If the jury saw you, they'd throw you over the side."
The jurors evaluate each performance on a scale from 20 to 1, with 1 being the lowest. Competitors don't get to see their scores, though; in fact, nobody does, ever.
Leonard Blessing, a retired science teacher from New Jersey, is sitting in the center's lobby while the competitors are brunching. Blessing has attended the previous six Kapells. He's been jotting notes on his favorite performers in the program's margins. He laments the fates of a few of his favorites whom the jury pared after the first round. "Elizabeth Schumann, for instance," he says. He looks over his notes. " 'Powerful, loads of contrast, beautiful pianissimo.' I thought she was superb. I can't believe she was passed by. The Chopin was magnificent. The Corigliano -- her initial attack, do you remember that?" He raises his eyebrows and grins. "BOOM!"
After her conference with the jurors, Schumann walks briskly up the lobby steps toward the back door. The handful of judges she spoke with, she says, claimed they gave her favorable marks, which left her wondering why she didn't advance. "This one woman, she didn't say anything about my playing, but she said I should play major works, some big classical sonata, but those huge sonatas have been recorded thousands of times." A mild frustration rises in her voice. "I can see the merit, still I'm not sure I understand. Nobody thinks it's fair. I feel more that this isn't about me or anything I could have done. I felt like I was true to the tradition passed on to me, and I don't feel like I should have done anything different."
Another young entrant comes out of her conference on the verge of tears. She evidently sneaked a peek at one of the score sheets and saw that one of the jurors had given her a 3.
"I just feel like telling people never to do competitions," another pianist says. "I got the impression that the whole thing's a big lotto."
Dan Moran is the second pianist to perform in the semifinal round, some minutes after 4 p.m. The New York Steinway, which has seen the heaviest use of the five pianos, shows a faint spattering of finger marks.
Moran eases onto the bench and spends a moment centering himself. Once he's got himself arranged, he launches into a Carl Vine sonata with trembling, widespread fingers. It's a dark, burbling and discordant piece that the jury may appreciate but elicits vacant expressions throughout the audience.
Then he moves on to a pair of Prokofiev's "Sarcasms" -- spiky, jouncing compositions named for their rancorous evasions of standard harmony. The "Sarcasms," again, seem to leave people cold, but Moran seems transfixed by the sound of the instrument and the look of his own hands, which move over the keys with the chaotic grace of a sheet of paper falling through empty air.
Then he moves on to Haydn's Sonata in A-flat, second movement. The opening bars are slow and guileless -- not nearly as perilous as the speedy grumbling of the Vine or the breakneck mania of the Prokofiev. But 20 seconds into it, he strikes a wrong note during a little filigree, and instead of moving on, he retraces his steps, and commits the error a second time, and then a third. It's as though he's simply lost interest in playing the piece correctly and instead seems fascinated by the harmonic possibilities of his mistake. After the third misstep, he finally gets back on track, and makes it through two concerto excerpts without incident. But the error in the Haydn is haunting him already. When Moran stands to bow at the end of his recital, he looks like a spooked horse.
Out in the lobby, a competitor who's already been eliminated reviews Moran's performance with a kind of bitter glee. "He was really all over the place. He's definitely out. No question."
Another eliminated competitor walks over.
"Feel better now?" the first fellow says. "Knowing that it doesn't mean anything?" By which he means that Moran's performance was so subpar that passing into the semifinals -- which neither of these two did -- is no real indication of talent.
Back in the competition office, Moran takes a moment to collect himself. There's an upright, mannequinish quality to the way he stands, as though he's trying hard to stave off collapse. "Oh, Jesus, I was really suffering up there," he says. "There were too many flub-ups. Jesus, why did it have to be today?"
Moran leaves for his hotel. Coordinator Chris Patton watches him go and shakes his head in sympathy. "I would crash and burn out there so fast," he says. "This would be my idea of hell, and I'm a performer."
Later, Moran is back in a practice room, revisiting his misstep in the Haydn.
"It was the worst nightmare that I could ever possibly imagine," he says. "I've never had a memory slip like that in my entire life of performing."
He taps out the botched phrase, listens, and plays it again. It's like someone prodding a wound.
"I know I didn't show it, but making it to the semifinals, it really meant a lot. It meant I'd sort of conquered my demons. It was very emotional, very hard to come back to earth and play again . . . But I just lost my way up there. I missed a turn. If I was Mario Andretti, I'd be dead."
Not far from Moran's practice room, Oxana Mikhailoff is sitting outdoors on a bench with Ning An and Roberto Poli, a phlegmatic, sturdily built Italian. The birds are singing, but they sound amateurish and inadequate. Mikhailoff, Poli and An are all semifinalists who have yet to perform, and they have been working hard. An's arms are plastered with Icy Hot patches, and he's been bandaging the fingers on both hands. The demands of musical combat, however, are nothing new for An, who's been competing on and off for the past 18 years. He won his first competition when he was 8, and since then he has participated in more piano contests than he can easily recall. An has performed in seven major international competitions and taken prizes in five of those, but never first. His résumé establishes him firmly as a "competition pianist," a term some competitors here use to imply a kind of androidhood about certain colleagues, but An is warm and affable. He hangs out for a while and then takes his leave: "I have to go practice my Haydn."
Mikhailoff and Poli have had enough for now, and they're heading to the movies. She flips through a newspaper and pauses at an ad that poses the question, "Ever Been Flooded With Anxiety?"
"Yes," she says. But the next night, Mikhailoff's performance goes admirably. Her Haydn is crystalline, nimble, even through all the perilous 16th notes. Her Rachmaninoff is turbulent and exultant. At the close of her program, audience members rise in dense thickets and applaud.
Afterward, pass holder Leonard Blessing says, "Oxana has my vote. She was terrific, brought tears to my eyes."
Blessing has a short colleague with him, a man named David Klunk, of McLean. "I wasn't gonna stand up, because standing O's don't help you with this crowd," Klunk says, jerking his head in the jury's direction. "But I went ahead and stood up anyway."
Mikhailoff makes for the back patio to call her husband. Well-wishers come by in a steady barrage, assuring her she's a lock for the final round. "Really? Really?" she says. She wears a voluminous grin that seems out of character for her.
"I was very happy with it," she says. "There's always a danger not to let yourself go, not to go fully into the music, but I felt like I was one with it." She takes a deep breath. "One gets totally affected by this competition, the anxiety. But it was great. Oh, what a hard thing to do. What a hard profession."
She looks out across the lawn and squints into the sun. "My life literally ends, now. I don't even think that my life will continue from that moment." She sighs and turns. "Oh, it's good. That's it. Now it's out of my hands."
They announce the finalists that evening at 8 in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall. Few people show up. Dan Moran arrives late and stands by the door. The three finalists are announced: Won Kim, Ying Feng, and Ning An of the Icy Hot patches.
"Well, that's all she wrote," Moran says. "They went for note-munchers, people who didn't offend. They go to competitions and they play and do well, but are they really making music, making artistry?" Then his features tighten in a mild scowl. "What does the jury know?" he says.
Some take a resigned, languidly xenophobic offense that the finalists' spots all went to Asian-born artists: two Chinese and one South Korean. "Had they picked three different finalists, more artistic people, I would have known they are looking for artists," one competitor says with unattractive bitterness. "But because they went for Chinese, I don't feel as bad."
Roberto Poli, standing nearby, is coolly enraged. "The jury will deny the public from hearing real music, and people will love it because they don't know anything." He snorts and waves his hand dismissively. "If they promote this [expletive], music is in deep [expletive]; we are in deep [expletive]. Obviously, they have no ears, and no understanding of music. We'll keep playing, and they'll keep judging and ruining people's lives . . . Bartok said, 'Competitions are for horses.' " Moran talks about catching the early flight home the following morning, but he does not. Instead, he goes out, drinks a lot of beer and gets to bed late. Though he was considering skipping it, he shows up at the semifinalists' awards reception the following afternoon. Anna Lou Dehavenon, William Kapell's widow, congratulates the nine semifinalists on their accomplishment and presents each of them with a boxed set of recordings by her late husband. In addition to a $1,000 award, each of the semifinalists also receives a miniature glass piano. When the gifts have been dispensed, the curtains part to reveal an ice sculpture of Steinway's lyre logo, which shimmers over citadels of hors d'oeuvres trays.
Moran sits at a table, his gifts laid out before him. He does not seem like the sort of person for whom a crystal piano would numb the sting of defeat, but in fact he's pleased. "I'm very happy with all these little gifts," he says. "If I didn't have this competition, I'd probably be doing another dinner music gig. I'm not going to go home and bury my head in the sand. I'm gonna go and play for people. I don't think there's anything to be bitter about."
Stewart Gordon, the head juror, stops at Moran's table: "I wanted to say how much I enjoyed your performance. I'll be following your career. You're just a fine young pianist."
"I'm over the moon now," Moran says after Gordon leaves. Even if he's only one of many stops along the juror's route of consolations, it doesn't seem to matter to Moran. "That felt really great."
The three performances of the final concerto round get underway on Friday evening at 8, and the house is sold out. The hall has lost the clinical quality that pervaded it in the early rounds, when there weren't enough people in the floor seats to diffuse the atmosphere of scrutiny. It just feels like a concert. Seats are in such high demand tonight that the ticket holders shoulder in among the jurors.
The house lights dim. Ning An enters from stage right. He bows, sits at the Steinway, and begins his concerto, the Rach Two. He looses the gathering storm of the opening chords, and when the orchestra pours out its big melancholy tide, the sheer vastness of the voice is magnificent. The grim beauty of the piece is overwhelming, but somehow it feels less desolate, not quite so tough on the heart as when Dan Moran played it in the practice room, accompanying himself on a cheaper Steinway with no one else around.
But Ning An's performance is passionate and unimpeachable. At the end of the evening, when the awards are announced, he takes first prize. Susie Farr, the Clarice Smith Center's executive director, chokes up a little as she reads his name into the microphone. An himself is impassive, though as the applause redoubles, he smiles with mannerly elation.
Chinese-born Ying Feng, 26, is awarded second for a high-octane and unorthodox interpretation of Tchaikovsky's Concerto No. 1. Won Kim, 30, of South Korea, takes third for a note-perfect if understated version of Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3. Beyond their basic virtuosity, the three performances have almost nothing in common, foiling the grousing allegations of Moran and others that the finalists would prove to be a uniform pack of bloodless technicians. "It was a very healthy mix," says coordinator Chris Patton, praising the finalists variously for "tremendous fire," "awesome" artistry and technical precision.
Afterward, Dan Moran stands in the lobby, autographing his head shot in the program for a pair of middle-aged admirers. "Two-time semifinalist," one says approvingly.
Moran is up early the next morning. He catches a propjet from BWI. It's a narrow plane with a school bus-style cabin, and he's wedged between two gigantic hockey players who keep retelling anecdotes of body checks they particularly enjoyed. The flight seems interminable, and when he finally makes it back to Montreal, he's glad to be home.
In the days after the Kapell, the memory of his semifinal performance stays sorely fresh. His big chance, he thinks, might have passed him by. He takes a trip to Mexico. He doesn't go near a piano for weeks. But when graduate school resumes, he starts to play again. It's difficult at first, but he feels a kind of strength returning to his hands, which, in fact, he'd gotten into pretty decent shape preparing for the Kapell. He and a manager who's taken an interest in him book a few engagements, auditions with promoters and conductors, and a recital in which he'll play Haydn's Sonata in A-flat -- the piece that probably sank him in Maryland but which he now can play almost in his sleep.
He has two more years before he finishes school -- not such a bad place to be, he believes. A few more concerts would be nice, but for now he's content to spend a few more years immersed in the lesser-known tributaries of the musical literature, delving more broadly and deeply into new repertoire.
Ning An, surprisingly, is back in school himself, working toward a master's degree and also enjoying the rewards of laureateship. Managers are pursuing him, sort of. "Instead of hearing from two out of 50," he says, "I hear from four out of 50." Promoters will take note of his success; more and better engagements will come his way. But these days, An says, even taking first in one of the nation's top competitions does not mean a great deal. "It's not like 50 years ago where if you won first prize, they gave you a ticker tape parade."
Like Moran, An says, he'll likely continue his studies and ultimately settle into a teaching career. Certainly, his winner's trophy will open doors for him and lend an extra burnish to his bio, but, he says, it isn't as though he's finally passed into the exclusive sanctum where a life as a professional artist lies within easy grasp. "You don't even know how far you are from the inner circle, that tightknit group who plays all the concerts," An says. "Some of us are closer than others, and most of us won't make it -- myself included -- but we are striving, and that's all we can do."
Wells Tower last wrote for the Magazine about voodoo in New Orleans. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. on Washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
